


Burn, Baby, Burn

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Firefighters, Angst, Demon Keith (Voltron), Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Keith (Voltron) Angst, Lance (Voltron) Angst, M/M, Unconventional Relationship, lance is a firefighter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-16 20:26:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16502144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Fire destroys. It eats, it burns, it kills with no  discretion. Lance knows this; it’s his job to douse the fire, to wash away the all consuming flame.Keith just wishes Lance could wash away his sins.





	Burn, Baby, Burn

**Author's Note:**

> so! this is the firefighter/fire demon au that no one asked for, but you got. i intended to make this a lot shorter, but after some long Angst Hours, y’all get this.
> 
> enjoy!

No one thinks in the heart of a fire.

There’s no time, too much smoke, the heat licking in like a scorned lover, seeking vengeance with scorched lips and burned tongue.

It is all muscle memory here, instinct snuffing out rational thought.

Lance pushes through, panting into his mouthpiece. His goggles fog up with the heat rising from his skin, eyes stinging with sweat. Shiro’s voice crackles through his earpiece and alerts everyone that all the people are safe, they’re outside. Lance nods, even though no one can see, his body processing the words before his mind can.

He turns and makes for the door, ducking as a piece something crashes down just short of his right arm. He jolts to the left and continues. There is no time for fear, no time for the existential consideration of all the ways he might have died.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he sees movement.

It’s more than the wild dancing of the flames, something much more solid and human. A hand – reaching out through the fire.

Lance’s body veers towards it, his heart thundering as the heat grows, closing in. He reaches for the hand, coughing as he does. There’s no time, no time to consider himself.

Only, the hand he grabs isn’t quite human. It’s softer, almost fluid as he grapples to hold on. He tugs, and finds that there’s nothing to tug at. No visible body connected to the arm. He gapes, mind whirling. He’s heard stories like this – men who get lost in the flames, pulled in by the fire till they’re close enough to burn. And they do, every single one of them.

Lance snatches his hand back, stumbling back as he attempts to make sense of what he just saw.

A pair of arms close around his middle and the next thing he knows, he’s being hauled backwards out of the crumbling house.

The fresh air stings, ice-bath cold. He gasps as a hand tugs his oxygen mask from his face. Voices and sirens echo around him as he blinks, trying to regain some sense of gravity and reality.

“What the fuck were you doing?” someone is yelling in his ear, even as they drag him bodily towards the back of an ambulance. Another pair of arms loop around his legs and he feels himself being hauled into the back of a too-bright car. His mocha hair sticks to his forehead as he fights the arms attempting to hold him down.

“I’m fine – get off – ”

“You’re not you raging asshat – you fucking ran into a wall of fire after we secured all the rescuees – what the hell were you – ”

“Let the guy breathe, we can’t take stats with you yelling in his ear like that.”

Lance groans as he feels someone tugging his suit from his body, pulling his arm out to wrap a pressure sensor around it. He tries to push it off but his hand gets a light smack.

“Quit that – lay still.”

Pidge’s face swims into vision, scowling as they press Lance’s arm down enough to get a good reading.

On his other side, Lance can see Shiro’s shock of bright white hair. He can almost see the steam rising out of his ears, his face set in a frown so deep it’s almost comical, but with concern swimming behind his eyes. Lance swallows down the urge to ask if it’ll ever come out.

“Idiot,” Shiro seethes, knitting his arms across his chest as Lance shoots him a dazed, sheepish grin.

“I thought there was another person in there,” he says, voice rough and crackling.

Shiro’s eyes narrow, “We’d accounted for everyone that was in that house – why the fuck would there be – ”

“Quiet!” Pidge snaps, and Shiro subsists with a long sigh.

He leans in close, lips paper white and pencil thin, “ – why the fuck,” he hisses, “would there be another person in there?”

Lance sighs and lets his eyes fall shut, “I dunno, maybe it was the dude who started the fire.”

Shiro pauses, frown flattening for just a moment as he considers. It’s not entirely implausible, if not for the fact that the detectives had already apprehended the guy, drunk off his socks with a pocket full of lighters.

Finally, Shiro heaves a sigh deep enough to shake the ambulance just as Pidge peels the pressure sensor off Lance’s arm. The sound of ripping Velcro makes Lance flinch.

“Fine, but next time, when I give the order to pull back, you fucking listen, you got it?”

Lance raises his free hand to this temple and forms a mock salute.

Shiro scoffs and punches his arm, perhaps a bit harder than the situation warrants.

“Brat,” Lance hears him mutter as he slides out of the ambulance to check on the rest of their team.

Pidge peers down at Lance with an amused expression.

“You really are a brat, you know.”

Lance offers him a lopsided grin, pushing himself up into a sitting position as Pidge pulls out a penlight and holds up a finger. Lance follow the light with his eyes as Pidge moves it back and forth across his line of sight. The brightness of it stings a little, and Lance can feel the exhaustion settling into his muscles even as he sits there.

“Great, no major injuries. You’re free to go, Lance.”

Pidge gives him a pat on the back as they toss the penlight back onto a metal tray.

Lance flashes him a thumbs up before sliding out into the biting chill of September nights. He sucks in a breath and lets it out, marveling at the fact that he can already see its ghost, soft and white before it dissipates.

He glances towards the last cresting waves of flames as the water pours down over it.

He frowns, squinting as the distinct shape of a person carves itself out of the withering fire.

But it can’t be, no one could survive in a fire for that long.

No one.

He stares, the image burning itself into his mind even as the water finally overpowers the fire – a man – he’s sure of it – standing there, unaffected by the flames. As if the fire were nothing, even though that can’t be true.

Lance blinks as the fire goes out. The image of the man in the fire flickering out with it.

He blinks again, searching but finding nothing. Nothing but smoke and darkness and the remains of what used to be a family’s life, settling into ash and dust and memories. And he tried, he could hear the tired cries of a boy, too young to really understand, the voice of his mother, cooing to smooth over his ruffled feathers. If he turned around look, he’d see the pale-faced father with a little girl clinging to his chest, speaking to an officer with a professional look of sympathy painted across his features.

He’d notice the men and women running to and from the house, the police tape being set up, the jarring flare of the red and blue lights glazing over the whole scene.

But he doesn’t – instead, all he can do is stare at the place where the figure had been. Just there, just ahead of him, surrounded by the fire.

Lance wonders if he could have saved him, whoever he was.

Then, Lance wonders if he really wanted to be saved.

* * *

Keith is always called, summoned, set, and he obeys each of these with the dutiful precision of a professional. Because there is nothing else left save for this stanch professionalism, not when his living and dying is dependent upon the wills and wiles of men.

It’s an exhausting occupation, but the one he was tasked with nonetheless, so he does it without complaint, to the best of his abilities.

There are some who would call him Death, and he supposes that it’s not entirely untrue. But what they all fail to realize is that if he were Death, then he is not the only one. For there are as many ways to die as there are stars in the sky. And he is but one of many humble creatures burdened with bringing of death.

Still, there are many times (most times actually) that he doesn’t have to bring anyone with him, doesn’t have to hold his hand out and wait for the stupid, willing souls to take them. The lighting of a candle, the burning in a fireplace, flash and flicker of flame as it kisses the end of a cigarette.

Those are the moments he likes the best, when he can snap his fingers and linger. When he can watch a couple in love over their dinner, or a girl reading in her room, quiet, content, happy.

Tonight was not one of those nights – and yet in some ways it was.

It had been a drunken mistake, as all things in the world are, at some point in time, and Keith had found himself standing next to a house, a cozy little thing with bright windows and a doormat that spoke of domestic bliss. He fingers grazed the bushes as they caught, the wind feeding the hungry flames as the plastic of the lighter starts to melt.

Keith lets out a heavy breath, reaching up to run his hands along the side of the house, sparks leaping up in its wake. He treads around the house, the soft grass beneath his feet smoldering after his footsteps. He leans up to press his lips to one of the wooden window frames and watches as the fire grows like a great hand, fingers closing over the house like it’s nothing more than a snow globe of contained moments.

He hears the panicked voices inside, the shouting, and then the sirens. They’re old friends of his, those sirens are – so familiar it’s almost a lullaby. So, Keith closes his eyes and lets the sounds wash over him, pushing through into the house from the crumbling porch windows. The carpet is soft and oh so flammable as he makes his way through the family room, marveling at all the photos on the walls. He reaches up to touch a particularly large frame of the family – a smiling mother, a grinning father, a baby strapped to the mother’s chest, a tiny mushroom of a girl peeking out between her father’s legs. Keith’s grins, fond as he traces a finger along the photo frame.

He walks through the house as if it were his own, pausing over stolen moments, memorabilia scattered across shelves and table tops, a half-finished puzzle lay on a large coffee table in front of the television. He can almost feel the laughter tickling his skin as the walls come down, all these trapped moments flittering out into the open air, dancing among the smoke before whirling up, up and away.

He feels more than he hears the firefighters come crashing in, their suits huge and heavy, immune to his flames. They barrel through the house like cannonballs, unforgiving as they navigate the landscape of falling house, halfway between memory and reality. Keith pauses as he watches one of the be-suited men cradle the little girl in his arms, rushing out of the torrent to hand her to her white-faced father before diving right back in.

Keith watches him scramble through the wreckage before turning back towards the door. A weight lifts from Keith’s chest – there will be no lives to take tonight. And for that, at least, he can be grateful. For lives are heavy, and the way to Ever After is long, and Keith is tired and tired and tired.

But something about this man draws him closer, makes him want to press up against his suit and peer into his eyes. And just as he’s about to take that step, something miraculous happens. The man turns to look straight at him – Keith can see it in the way his body moves, lurching for him as if propelled by some invisible force.

Outside, the rest of the firemen are yelling – where’s Lance? He’s still in there! I’ll go get him –

Lance – a nice name, Keith thinks as he reaches out his hand, watching as Lance reaches for it, fingers closing over his wrist. He has no urge to pull Lance into the mess of heat and fire, but his curiosity bubbles inside him. There have only been a handful of people who could see him in the past, and all of them only seconds before their own demise. Not here – here Keith doesn’t feel the weight drag in his stomach, knows that it’s not Lance’s time yet, not yet anyway. And still, Lance reaches for him.

That is, until his hand is ripped out of Keith’s grasp by another fireman, dragging Lance away, and just like that, he’s gone.

Keith watches from the burning house as Lance is hauled into an ambulance, and disappears. He watches still as Lance re-emerges, looking the worse for wear, but very much alive. He watches as Lance’s face turns towards him, his expression shifting as he finds what he’s looking for – Keith.

The first few droplets of water hit him like relief. Keith feels himself fading, simmering down as it rains and rains and rains. He gives Lance one last look before allowing himself to sink into the warm dampness of the earth below, the sky snuffing out in a wisp of smoke.

* * *

The issues of the man in the fire, Lance discovers, is not entirely unique to him. A brief search on the internet provides that a collection of people who have had near-death experiences in fires also recall seeing a man, though accounts differ on the specifics.

Some say it was a tall man, some say short, some say the man had silver hair, some say he wore a cloak of flames. But no one seems to have reached out and touched this man before.

And after a certain number of pages, Lance has to admit defeat to the unreliable narrator that is the internet. Unfortunately, Google has yet to add a filter for true stories verses creepy pastas, and the latter is always more interesting.

When he tells Shiro about it, Shiro reacts in much the same way as most any sane human would – with disbelief.

“You saw a man in the fire.”

“Yes.”

“A man of fire, in the fire.”

“Yes.”

“And you reached out to grab his fiery arm instead of booking your ass out of the burning building.”

Lance heaves an exasperated sigh.

“I thought it was another victim! Like what else was I supposed to think?”

Shiro makes a noncommittal noise, scratching at his chin as they lounge on the firehouse sofa.

“And you said you saw him in the fire after you got out of the ambulance too?”

Lance nods, letting his head loll back onto the cushions.

“Right,” Shiro claps his hands and digs around his pocket for his phone.

Lance frowns, “What are you doing?”

Shiro doesn’t look up, “Calling Pidge.”

“What – why – oh my god I’m not going crazy or anything.”

Shiro pins him with a sharp look, “You’re seeing people made of fire – I can’t have you losing it on another rescue like you did. You’re gonna get a psyche eval and you can’t go into the field till you’ve been cleared.”

Lance groans, “Goddamnit – ”

“Hey, it never hurts to get checked up. This job is tough – it’ll get to you if you don’t – ”

Lance lets out a frustrated moan, “I’m fine. Just forget I said anything.”

He pushes off the sofa and stalks out of the room, but not before he picks up the first beats of Shiro’s call.

– “Hey Pidge, it’s me. I gotta favor to ask” –

Three blocks along, Lance realizes where he is going, his feet taking him to the old backroad of his elementary school playground, where he’d first learned the meaning of fire. He was young then (he’s young now, but in a less indignant kind of way) and thirsty for knowledge as young people often are. His parents and their neighbors were having a barbecue; Lance, mightily annoyed with the squabbling of the neighbors’ kids, sat by himself on a swing a bit away from the rowdiness of it all.

He watches his father strike a match and toss it into the dark pile of coal, watches as the flames roar to life, his mother jumping back with a shriek of laughter before his father pulls her close and plants a kiss on her cheek. He watches the fire dance and dance till someone puts the music on and the people are dancing too.

The warmth had licked at his face, making his sweat when he’d wandered close enough to hear the crackling. He’d felt it then too, the urge to reach out his hand, just to see if the fire would reach back.

Lance turns the corner to the dollar store and buys a lighter, shoving it into his pocket as he exists and makes for the now abandoned playpark. It’s the middle of the day – the middle of the most biting parts of autumn. No one in their right mind would dilly-dally.

He pushes back the cover to the barbeque grill with a grunt, nose crinkling as the dust and char stir enough to be picked up by the wind. He coughs and bends down, eyeing the bit of coal left in the grill.

The lighter is cheap and bright yellow – but it does its job. It only takes a few good fans before a low flame is simmering beneath the darkened rungs. Lance takes a few steps back, the distance from the bench to the fire seeming so much shorter now than it did when he was 6, sits down, and watches.

* * *

It is not the strangest call he’s gotten, but it is strange nonetheless.

The wind is cold and unfriendly, but it’s never stopped Keith before.

He snaps and the fire catches, grinning as he watches Lance settle back into the bench, eyes trained on the embers. Keith sits too, letting the quiet fill the space around them. He wonders how long it’ll take.

It doesn’t take very long.

* * *

Lance blinks as his eyes catch on something – a shape in the fire, but no, it’s gone again. He frowns, leaning closer, forcing his eyes to keep open despite the unrelenting wind.

And there, he’s sure of it – a hand, reaching out from the heart of the fire, and then the rest – shoulders, a torso, crossed legs, a face. He’s... beautiful.

Lance swallows, his whole body frozen as he stares at the figure growing from the flames, but not entirely of it either. He is the fire, but he is smoke too, his form not entirely corporeal, but definitely real enough not to be mistaken for a trick of the eye or illusion of the mind.

“Holy shit,” Lance murmurs, blinking rapidly as the figure cocks his head in Lance’s general direction.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you too.”

Lance almost yelps, for the man’s voice doesn’t sound like a voice at all – it is deep and warm and crackling, with a kind of vibrancy that sparks around the edges of all his words.

“What the fuck – ” Lance stares for a solid half minute before pinching himself on the thigh and wincing, “ow – motherf – ”

The man laughs, the sound rumbling and rough.

“I’m not dreaming, am I,” Lance says, looking back up at the man.

He shakes his head, “No, I’m afraid you’re not. But I doubt anyone would believe it if you told them.”

“So it was you in the fire the other day.”

“Straight to the point, huh – ” the man sighs, “yes, that was me. Though I have to say, it came as a shock to me too. You don’t seem suicidal.”

Lance lets out a strangled laugh, shaking his head, “No, I’m definitely not.”

The man lets out a puff of smoke, “And yet you ran right towards me the other day.”

“I – I thought you were another victim in the building.”

And really, he shouldn’t sound so defiant chatting with the literal incarnation of the thing he spends his adult life fighting, but it’s hard not to.

A silence ensues during which the only sounds are the crinkling of leaves and the steady crackling of the fire.

“Lance, by the way,” Lance says, suddenly.

The man raises a flame-licked eyebrow.

“My name,” Lance continues to clarify.

“I know,” the man says, unfazed.

“Oh…” Lance leans back till he hits the back of the chair, hands clasped in his lap as he casts about for something to say. It’s not every day he gets to speak to fire, and certainly not every day when fire speaks back.

“Keith,” the man says, after another beat, to which Lance looks up, frowning.

“My name,” Keith parrots, with the shadow of a smirk on his lips.

“Wow – I thought you’d have a cooler name.”

Keith laughs again, “So did I, but it’s one of the few things we get to keep so I figured I’d keep mine.”

Lance frowns, “Keep? You mean you weren’t… you weren’t always…” he gestures vaguely in Keith’s direction.

Keith grins, “Always made of fire? No. I wasn’t. Believe it or not, this is my job, as much as fighting me is yours.”

“Oh,” Lance says again, eyes flickering down to his feet, to the slight shadows the fire casts in the grass.

“I’m sorry,” he says, finally, after cycling through all the things he could have said but deemed inappropriate.

“For what?” Keith asks.

Lance looks up, “It just doesn’t sound like the best job to have.”

Keith stares at Lance for a moment before he bursts out in laughter, head tossing back as the fire dances up around him, flaring so high Lance feels the wave of heat rolling over his skin. The sound rumbles and booms like thunder, the fullness of it heavy as it dissipates around them, though the echo lingers beneath Lance’s skin, warm and comforting.

“No,” Keith says, after he settles down, leaning forward to study Lance more closely, “it’s not – but then again, your job doesn’t sound so great either.”

Lance shrugs, “It’s what I’ve always wanted to be.”

“What, a firefighter?”

Lance shakes his head, a childish gleam in his eyes as he grins, “No, a hero.”

Keith nods, “Well Lance, for a hero firefighter, you’re not so bad.”

Lance laughs, shaking his head as he tries to wrap his mind around everything, “For fire, you’re not so bad either.”

He decides not to tell Shiro and Pidge about his unorthodox friendship with the literal incarnation of fire, because well. But he builds a firepit in his backyard and spends the chilly nights huddled next to it, waiting till Keith appears. And sometimes, they would spend the whole evening in silence, and other times, Lance would as Keith questions, and Keith would answer as best as he can.

Lance still looks for Keith in the fires he dives into, always keeping an eye out for the flicker of movement so characteristic of Keith’s appearance. But often, he doesn’t have time to linger, not when entire lives are burning down around him.

“Why do you do it?” Lance asks one night, the almost-full moon skimming the edge of the horizon.

Keith hums, “Do what?”

“Burn down houses… take lives… kill people.” He tries to keep his voice flat, but the fire had been bad that day. The team barely made it out alive – there weren’t even bodies to be saved after.

Keith heaves a heavy sigh. It sends the flames skittering in bright sparks across the sky.

“Fires don’t kill people,” he says, voice solemn, “people do.”

Lance lifts his head to look at Keith, who looks even more tired than usual. And Lance often wonders if there are such things as days off in the other world, whichever one it is that Keith lives in.

“But – I mean, you have to have some agency, right? You’re here, and you’re talking to me. That’s a choice, right?”

Keith looks at Lance, just looks at him, for a very, very long time, before he lowers his eyes to the palms of his hands.

“Yes, and no. You see, I cannot reject a call – if a fire is being set, I cannot decide to un-set it. It is an unfortunate duty, but a duty nonetheless.” And when he doesn’t move to elaborate, Lance feels a spark of anger rise in his chest.

“But you can’t you quit? Decide not to do anything at all?”

Keith’s voice doesn’t change – it’s a soft, crumbling, crackle of a thing, “They would just find a replacement.”

“A – replacement?”

Keith nods, “Yes, someone who will do the job. There are always souls to bind to these unsavory tasks. And if I were to refuse all callings, what of the people freezing to death, who pray for me to warm their hands? What of those who depend on me to eat and bathe? I cannot shuck one side of the job for favor of the other, because at the end of the day, I am just the flame. It is you who decides what to do with it.”

Lance sighs, carding a hand through his hair.

“Still,” he insists, the images of the carnage from that morning seared into his mind’s eye – the house cracking open and crumbling down, spilling its intestines out into the street faster than the water can control it. It had looked like a great belly, churning and turning, consuming everything it can reach.

Lance had prayed for Keith to hear him – to pull back, to show a little restraint.

He hadn’t.

“I wish I could stop,” Keith says, his voice nothing more than a whisper of smoke.

Lance lifts his head, “Then why don’t you?”

A pained expression flashes across Keith’s face. He looks as if he’s fighting for words, the bright of his eyes downcast.

“Because, I am selfish,” he says, finally, “I don’t want to disappear.”

Lance’s stomach clenches at the familiarity of his voice. At the way it catches and stumbles. Lance studies Keith’s face, down-turned, his hands clutched in his lap.

Fear, Lance realizes with a jolt – Keith sounds afraid.

Lance wants to reach out, touch those eyes that seem like they’re going though so much pain. He wants to wash away his suffering.

It hurts.

For the first time, Lance considers the flames – not Keith, but the fire itself. He watches it dance, watches it breathe, watches it as it reaches up towards the sky as if searching for something to hold on to. It’s no wonder that people talk about fire like it’s a living thing – it is.

Lance goes to sleep that night wondering if Keith has nightmares and if they'd be about thunderstorms.

* * *

The smoke is thick – too thick to see through. Lance pushes through the thick veil into a stairwell leading up to a darkened hallway. He stumbles up the steps, taking long breaths as he makes it to the top, nearly crashing through the door to a child’s room. There’s a body on the ground, tiny braids falling by her face.

Lance doesn’t think – there’s no time, no time – he scoops up the child and races back into the hallway, shoulder ramming painfully into the wall. He comes to a halt at the mouth of the stairwell – the fire is too far up. There’s no way he’d make it out of there.

He turns back into the kid’s room, eyes catching on the window. There’s smoke slithering in through the crack beneath the door.

Lance places the child down as carefully as he can before he pulls at the lever of the window. It doesn’t budge. He tugs at it again – nothing.

He lets out a frustrated growl as he throws his entire weight against the glass and feels it shudder beneath this weight.

Smoke fills the room. Any more smoke inhalation could do serious damage to the girl’s lungs. He scours the room and grabs her jacket, so tiny in his clumsy, gloved hands. He presses it over her mouth and nose and swears under his breath as the fire creeps in.

He lunges at the window again.

Nothing.

The doorframe catches and the wallpaper flares up.

“No, no, please,” Lance mutters, blinking back the sweat, his heart thudding too hard too fast.

There’s not enough air, not enough time.

He cradles the little girl to his chest and backs up against the window, slamming a fist against it. The reverberating bang sounds like betrayal.

Lance looks back at the door, now entirely consumed in flames. He pants for breath and feels a sick prickling clawing its way up his throat. He chokes back a sob, his entire body going numb as the heat presses in and in and in.

An arm reaches out of the fire, a body emerges.

“Keith, please – don’t do this.”

Keith’s face is soft with sorrow.

“Please, I – I don’t – I don’t want to disappear,” Lance says, the fear in his chest squeezing fist tight, his right arm still pounding a fist against the window even though he knows it’s useless.

Keith takes a step closer and the fire grows behind him, and another step, his fingers trailing along the child-sized bookshelves lining the girl’s room.

Lance lets his head fall back against the glass, his vision going blurry as the fire closes in around him. Keith’s face is too close, the heat is too much, and in a brief moment of clarity, Lance wonders if they’ll call him a hero in his obituary, if the word will be carved into his tombstone.

Lance thinks he hears a sigh, or it might just be a whoosh of wind that sounds vaguely like Keith’s voice –

Go, it says, go be a hero.

And then he’s falling, tumbling out of the window with the girl still held to his chest.

The hit the storm-drain with a deafening clank before they crash into the soft earth of the house’s front lawn.

There are people on him in an instant, pulling him away from the burning house.

“Holy shit get him onto a gurney – he’s got the girl – c’mon Lance, it’s okay, you can let go now – ”

Pidge’s voice is soft and soothing as they pull Lance’s mask from his face, but Lance doesn’t loosen his grip. There are tears blurring his eyes, still he fights off the hands as they try to steer him away from the fire.

“Hey, it’s okay – look at me, you’re okay,” Pidge has a hand in his hair, the other waving off the other paramedics to go grab oxygen for the little girl and an IV for Lance.

It is the first time Lance allows himself to cry, the light of the fire bright behind his screwed-shut eyes. In his arms, she can feel the weight of the little girl, her tiny body still thrumming with life. He feels Pidge easing her out of his arms to place an oxygen mask on her face.

He finally lets her go, his whole body shaking as he breathes, ragged and deep.

“You’re okay,” Pidge repeats, over and over again, till Shiro finds them, tugging Lance into a hug so tight he almost loses his breath again.

Still, he refuses to get up, watching as the fire licks up at the sky, the embers and sparks rising up like so many fireflies trying too hard to be stars.

He knows he shouldn’t be alive – knows that Keith had done something he shouldn’t have. He watches the fire grow and grow, a hollowed out sense of loss gnawing at his stomach till he can’t tell the difference between living and dying and figures that there really isn’t a difference.

Pidge and Shiro leave him after a while, sharing worried looks over his head as they rush off to help other people in more dire need of their skills.

Lance sits there, his suit half on, half off, watching as the water showers down, as the flames abate. It takes too long for the fire to go out, as if it were fighting for the last few moments it has – Lance scans the fire for Keith’s familiar shape but he doesn’t find it.

Instead, as the fire finally settles into ash and smoke, the sky lightens, first to a light gray-blue, and then to a pale yellow and pink. And finally, as the sirens quiet and the hustle wears down, the sky turns bright orange and red as the sun sets the horizon aflame.

It is only then that Lance turns back towards his team, who are all waiting for him around their truck, Shiro watching him with bright eyes.

 

It hurts. It burns in the pit in his stomach, hot and angry and mournful.

 

 

Lance glances back as the dawn breaks over a newborn day, and he hopes that out there somewhere, Keith could be reincarnated as the sun.

So that every day, he can set the clouds on fire, and watch the whole sky burn.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this mess, folks! Comments and kudos keep my chaotic angst energy going, so please comment anything you want to say below! <3 
> 
> thank you so much for reading.


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